Tuesday, December 04, 2007

Men out of time

We don’t aspire to cool around here. It’s too taxing, and we’re not part of the right demo, anyway. Too old, too married, too many kids, too concerned about college basketball, too little attention given to cutting-edge footwear. Mostly, though, we’re just too indifferent to status, which, come to think of it, may be an indicator that we are, in fact, cool. Well, maybe Trip is cool. Me, I sold out to the man and started hawking t-shirts online, permanently and eternally disqualifying me from cool consideration.

I digress. To the extent I ever was cool, it was for about five minutes in the 1990s, which, coincidentally, is the name of the band I recently saw open for Art Brut and The Hold Steady. 1990s, that is. If I were cool, instead of them just being a band whose name was familiar from something I read somewhere, I would have known that their roots go back to Yummy Fur, the same band that gave birth to Franz Ferdinand, and I would have owned their album in its proper stateside release form, plus a handsome armload of imports and b-sides. Instead, they were just the band playing to a mostly empty house when I eased into the funky/musty main room. But as I watched the jagged three-piece with the thick Scottish brogues play, a couple of light bulbs went on. One said “these guys remind me of the Fratellis” (and if living in the great middle west does anything, it gives you license to think that all Scottish trios sound alike). The other said “these songs are good.”

So I picked up the album. And those songs are good. There’s nothing profound going on; it’s all sugar-high, a spike of good feeling that lasts for three minutes and then fades away (speaking of the Fratellis . . .). But I like my candy now and then, and these stomping, spiky hooks (which on disc suggest Primal Scream more than the aforementioned Frats), tickle my taste buds even if they fail to nourish my soul. Have a listen.